Page 10 of Sucker For You

“. . . right.”

Of course, why would he care about that?

She jammed the bristles into the tube.

No one ever cared.

But he didn’t jeer at her. He didn’t laugh. He let his affirmation settle into silence and continued to observe her—or to observe her fight with the tubing. She twisted a pipe cleaner down, down, down its length until she met resistance, flexing. . . and the hose gave a belch and a dribble of slimy water. The clog cleared. She didn’t recoil at the algal smell, just stared at the burping line while she fitted the hose back into its pump. The motor juddered and began to inhale marginally cleaner water with an angry urgency.

It might still be too late for the coral.

And really, Isabel herself should have run when she’d had the chance.

It wasn’t that Wes was preventing her from leaving the bungalow. She’d invadedhisspace. He was still watching her, though. She willed her fidgeting hands to quiet. The moisture oozing from her hair might have been sweat. She fixed her focus on the tank and waited for questions, braced for judgment.

“Isabel, are you all right?”

. . . what?

She blinked at the pump.

“Are you. . . safe?”

Safe?

No.

No, she wasn’t.

Not when the clock read fifteen minutes pastHigh Tide. How could she articulate what those simple increments of time meant to her? How could she explain the importance of every passing second chipping away at the month of September, then the ten months after that? She had eleven months left until her visa expired and forced her back to Canada. Unless she secured a spousal Green Card. But:belt, stilettos, stares—no, no, no. If she couldn’t manage her situation with Chase, she’d lose access to BioPulse’s experimental migraine medication. It would take hours to explain why that mattered so much, though. Toreallyexplain. Besides, why would Wes care? They were strangers in a bungalow rented by other people, interlopers in matching bathrobes.

Nothing about this conversation or situation made any sense. . .

Abruptly, despite the panic and adrenaline and cold, she was so,sotired.

She dragged a hand over the bridge of her nose.Are you safe?She said, “I went swimming. I drove to Monterey, and I went swimming.”

“You went swimming?”

“Yes.”

“At night.” His voice was flat.

“Yes.”

“Without a wetsuit.”

She shrugged.

“That’sinsane.”

One of Isabel’s shoulders rose and fell. Water dribbled along her legs from under the terrycloth robe, dotting her ankles, trickling into a puddle on the rug. Weren’t her feet frozen? She didn’t retreat, continuing to fiddle with the reef tank’s pump, working to resuscitate a few spires of half-dead calcium carbonate stuck in gravel. Her lips were set, her eyes downcast through the wet ripple of her hair.

“I don’t think you can save the coral,” he told her, when it was clear that she wouldn’t respond to his incredulity about her swim. “See the bleaching? That means it’s—”

“—stressed.” She unearthed a surface skimmer from the credenza and dunked it into the tank. “Coral expels the zooxanthellae—the photosynthetic cells—living in its tissues when the water temperature or pH is inhospitable. It’s fragile, but it’s not dead.”

“Right, sure.” Notwithstanding his agreement, something twisted deep in his chest.Wrong.Because Isabel had immersed herself tonight in frigid Monterey Bay, and now she was trying to salvage the tank’s dying organisms instead of elevating her core temperature back to a normal range. Even while her hands worked mechanically with the mesh and the pump, she shivered. If the coral was stressed, so was her body. Which she probably knew. Still: “People get hypothermia in the Pacific, Isabel.”